On Reddit.com there's a recent post questioning the (recently) common saying that PHP developers should avoid static methods when concerned about testability:

I get it: testing is important, and building your codebase in a manner that is easy to test should be a priority. However, sometimes I feel like I have to compromise on the elegance of my code in order to maintain testability. Cases where perhaps a static method makes sense, but end up having to perform some coding acrobatics in order to avoid it. Is this a common challenge, something many developers face and must balance between? Or am I misguided in how frequently static methods can be the most elegant solution (before taking testability into consideration)?

Answers point out a few things - that sometimes, state doesn't matter and static is okay or that they can be used if the instance they return is always exactly the same, never altered.